Devour
by TheNewBrawler
Summary: So you believe you're entitled to this control, even if you have no understanding of what you really hold. TT2!verse.


_Disclaimer – Don't own Tekken._

_Note – This is kind of old. I started it as a writing exercise. :P_

Devour

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When they find her, shambling and as naked as the biblical Eve in the undergrowth, they are instructed to take her deep within the lush grounds of the Mishima estate and see to her every need. They ignore how her eyes glow a dim yellow, even as the wash girl lets out a shriek as a thick, inky mauve stains her apron right through.

When her thoughts finally arrange themselves in clear, collected lines and her flesh is clean and cold, do they dress her in white and present her to her host.

His unnaturally procured youth sits oddly on him. His skin is as fair and smooth as a child's, his hair as vivid as the down of a raven's wing, but his eyes are as old and as grubby and as wicked as she remembers.

"This is indeed an unexpected guest," his voice carries the deftness of a young man, but with the bizarre edge of a deep, gravelly bass. "You may prove useful to my interests."

She gazes at him from behind the backs of her golden irises and struggles to _remember_ before.

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.

How she may prove useful, she hasn't yet deduced.

The white kimono they've given her is as immaculate, chilly on her skin. She'd sat alone for the first few days, her food given to her by a stammering maid through a cat flap in the door. For a while, she was content to linger in the sweetly scented dark. It was frustrating to wind through the monochrome kaleidoscope of her memory; of the stink and crackle of charred wood and the metallic spoil of blood between her lips. So, instead, she compels her mind to a comforting blank.

However, as the days spill out, her nails become nibbled to the bone and the hem of her kimono frayed from fidgeting. There is a creeping itch, a more familiar restlessness, beginning to fester within her blood and so one morning she rises and tries the door. It is unlocked.

There is a fresh bath awaiting her, as if _he_ too was aware of her gathering senses, and a fresher, even more blinding snow kimono. Stitched along the arms are delicately woven pink lotuses.

She wanders through the snaking corridors of the estate, observing in silence how the body guards and the maids and the servants peel back into the walls, as if she is some walking spectre. Her hair, she is aware of now, is longer and reaches her shoulders. Outside, the sky twills with birdsong and she feels the crisp crack of grass beneath her toes.

One of the male servants finally approaches her. He bows as soon as she diverts her attention from the dark, twisted shapes of the beckoning forest.

"Good morning, Ms. Kazama. Mr. Mishima is expecting you this evening for dinner."

When she returns to her room, Jun looks in the mirror and sees a pair of eyes, black as night, staring back.

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"What year is it?"

It's the first question his guest asks him. Seated at the end of the table groaning with food, her black bangs hanging too low and far over her now natural eyes. He scoffs in reply, helping himself to another dumpling. He never liked women with messy fringes.

"Seven years to the day, Ms. Kazama," He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling the youthful density of his beard, and his smirk widens. "Seven years since you vanished."

Jun mouths it to herself, the fine lines of her eyebrows latching together. Her likeness to Jin is startling, and he feels his lips downturn. She possesses that apologetic politeness Jin was prone to in his younger years, until he thankfully beat it out of the boy. In a woman it is acceptable. In a man it is merely weakness.

She lifts her gaze and he suddenly isn't so sure.

"I died." She says it loudly, as it tasting her words. Her fingers twist into the silken fabric of the kimono. Her breath hitches, high and quick, in her throat. "I died."

"You didn't die," He swallows, and picks his teeth with the end of his chopstick. "You're sitting here, aren't you? Alive and well."

Her eyes snap to his with terrifying intensity. And then, as if in realization, her shoulders fall and an unreadable composure lines out her brow.

She doesn't touch her food. He finds it awfully rude, but clears it away anyway.

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The door is no longer locked, but guards stand straight and silent outside her door each night.

She could break them as easily as blinking, but there is a crusted old compassion that lingers like a scar on her heart and so her eyes remain blank and without tint. But each time she looks in the mirror, they appear darker, as if she's been bruised beneath the iris.

Each morning, they deliver her the paper.

The headlines scratch softly away at her self-control, touching the rise of memory like raw nerve. The face (_her features, her full lower lip, the arch and crease of the eyes, her, so her but not_) that smears itself across each and every panel brails something she keeps locked down deep.

Jun begins to decline them. But each morning they arrive, earlier than before, and one day she opens her door and sees her oh so generous host shoot her a smirk from the landing.

Her eyes gloss like the gentle incandescence of candlelight.

And then she recalls baby bottles and broadening shoulders and the creak of masculine voice, and the feel of water toying between her toes and the sweep of moon across forests, and a small hand curved in the arch of her palm, and the printed face blazes alive in the shifting kaleidoscope of her crumbling recollections and her ensuring cry tears through the house.

It's a roar wrung tight with possession, with terrible hunger, and when Heihachi finds her, the guards are scattered across her room in slumped, shattered shapes and she is still, and calm, and horrifyingly beautiful.

"My son," She demands quietly; politely, as always. "Where is my son?"

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"You belong to me."

He takes her below, below to where his other beast remains chained and howling. Animal bones glint ashy white in the dark. "You all belong to me. Kazuya. Jin. Even that screeching demon. You all will fall beneath my power."

The garden he has fashioned for her is endless, lovely, scored in water colours. She acknowledges it blandly. It's a prison, but a pretty one, none the less.

"As you say," is her mild reply. Gone is that tight, tremulous tension. She merely seems to float now, as powerless as any innocent, and Heihachi wonders if the reveal of Jin as unscrupulous monster has snapped her mind. If so, then how painfully boring.

She perches herself on the wide, peachy pink petals of the overgrown lotus, and smiles dreamily.

"Hm." He crosses his arms. "You're taking this well, woman."

She lifts her head, still smiling that loose, stupid smile and Heihachi is aware of the first roll of regret in his stomach.

"If all I need to do is wait, as you say," she says slowly. "Then all shall become right. Waiting is what I'll do."

"You'll be doing it a lot then." He walks to the exit. As he goes to leave, the hologram stutters for a brief moment; revealing a huge, white, walled room.

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He was planning to test her DNA, but it seemed that whatever samples they had discreetly lifted from her person had become soaked in purple sludge. Some idiot had spilt something in the laboratory, he was sure of it.

He fired all the lab technicians.

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Her garden is a pastel blur beneath the red of his eyes.

She sits in the middle of it, hugging one knee to her chest. Her gaze is focused on the flickering, static blue of her imaginary sky.

He spits blood. It clings to the suddenly too sharp shards of grass, and Jin must have hammered his head _really_ hard this time.

"Your son," He grips the wiry branch of a nearby tree; nothing but a prop, a suggestion of actual plant life, even if the bark is warm and dry from the nonexistent sun. He licks the blood from his lips, and smirks. "Jin is coming here now. No more waiting."

Jun pushes herself off her lotus bed. Ripples emerge from where her bare feet meet the water. She stands tall, otherly and elegant. A lady of war, his father would have said.

"I wasn't waiting for my son."

The branch is slimy rot beneath his fingers. Grimacing, he pulls it back, revealing sick violet tendrils clinging to his skin.

In the water, an incoming swirl of purple swells and spreads like widening plaque sores.

She is naked, naked as the biblical Eve, clothed in a swarming mass of poisonous lavender and her eyes burn wolfish citrine.

And he'd forgotten about her ability to see beyond time, beyond place, beyond whatever dark and stinking purgatory she had resided in for the last seven years. As her glare snatches away the last remainders of his strength, he recalls a young man's body, the boy who shared his blood, spread eagled and lifeless amongst the hovering shadows of his men. A wound weeps between the child's temples, and Heihachi feels the phantom weight of a gun smoking and heavy in his hand.

He wheezes as she reaches for him.

"_He won't see me like this,"_ There is an echo in her voice, like the scrambling tininess of a broken radio. Her entire body bristles with a terrible, tortured love and this isn't the power of Kazuya's devil or Jin's handsome demon. It's a wrath born of inevitable natural disaster, like the swallowing crash of a tsunami or the lashing twists of a hurricane. _"And you will not trouble him again."_

She's been stripped down, he realises; sweetly honed inhibitions torn away to reveal the base instincts of motherhood. Protect, defend, _devour._

He fights her, and she indulges him for a while, until she claws him down into her lake the colour of molten mulberries.

Together, they sink into the abyss.


End file.
